kirukkal.com

June 7, 2026

Your Call Is Important to Us

Adaptation (2002), Nicholas Cage

Last winter I spent fifty-one minutes on the phone with an insurance company, and I would like those minutes back, although I understand the request will be routed to a department that does not exist.

Forty-three of the fifty-one were hold. The other eight were spent talking to a man named, he said, Brandon, who was very sorry, who was so sorry, who was sorrier than anyone has ever been about anything, and who was, structurally, unable to help me, because Brandon was the human equivalent of the “door close” button in an elevator, which has been disconnected since the nineteen-nineties and is left there purely so you have something to press. The other forty-three minutes belonged to a recorded woman. She had a lovely, untroubled voice. At intervals she informed me that my call was important to them, and she did this with the warmth of someone who has never once been on hold, who will never be on hold, who exists on a higher plane entirely, untouched by the menu system she serves.

The music, while this went on, was The Girl from Ipanema. It is always The Girl from Ipanema. I have come to believe there is one recording of it somewhere, sealed in a vault under a mountain, and that every telephone hold line on earth pipes from this single source, because no human being has ever consciously decided to play it and yet there it always is, tall and tan and young and lovely, going by, while you slowly age. And yet someone did decide. Somewhere there is or was a person whose whole job was to select, for an entire company, the sound a frightened customer would be made to listen to while deciding whether to give up. A piece composed, as far as I can tell, to be survived rather than heard, the audio equivalent of a beige wall. It struck me at minute forty as a kind of authorship, unasked-for and unthanked.

There is a betrayal built into the menu, and I want to honor it. You press one. Pressing one sends you to a submenu. The submenu, after some thought, returns you to the main menu, the way a cat brings a dead bird to a door. At one point a cheerful voice offered to let me “press seven to hear these options again,” and I want to meet the person who, at minute thirty-nine of a hold, thinks what would help here is hearing the options again.

At minute fifty-one the call dropped.

I mention this not because the insurance company wronged me, though it did, comprehensively, but because of something Mani Ratnam once said that I have never managed to shake. He was talking about where scenes in stories come from, and he made the claim, calmly, as though it were not faintly monstrous, that there is no situation so sorrowful or so absurd that a writer cannot salvage something from it. The writer, he said, comes in two halves. One half is inside the moment, suffering it like a normal person. The other half is a few feet back, unmoved, professional, already going through the wreckage for anything it can carry home. And that is exactly what happened on hold. One half of me was with Brandon, aging audibly, genuinely losing. The other half was asking, over the Girl from Ipanema, whether a man this thoroughly beaten might be worth an essay. He was not, as it turned out. But the half that asks does not know that yet, and never does, which may be the only reason any of us keeps writing things down.

Here is the thing nobody tells you. Having a topic and having an essay are as different as owning flour and owning bread, a distinction I grasp instantly in a kitchen and forget every single time at a desk. I had all the flour. I had bags of it. The words would not emulsify. Some subjects have a person trapped inside, hammering to get out, and some subjects are just the wall, and you cannot tell which is which from the doorway. They look identical on the list where you write down topics. They stay identical right up until the afternoon, months later, when one of them has quietly eaten a season of your life and the other one became a different essay, a good one, that I will not name here because it would be tacky.

Anyway. There is exactly one movie about this, and it should never have been allowed near a studio.

In the late nineties a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, who had just become famous for writing a film in which people climb through a tunnel into the head of the actor John Malkovich, was hired to adapt a book called The Orchid Thief. The book is real and lovely. It was written by Susan Orlean, and it is about a man in Florida who steals rare orchids, and about orchids, and about wanting things, and it has, as a piece of plotting, the forward momentum of a parked car. Nobody is trying to get anywhere. There is no villain, no clock, no chase. It is a wonderful book to read and an impossible book to turn into the kind of thing Nicolas Cage runs away from explosions in.

So Kaufman, unable to find the movie inside the book, wrote a movie about Charlie Kaufman being unable to find the movie inside the book. The film is two hours of a sweating, balding, romantically hopeless screenwriter failing to write the exact film you are watching. It opens inside his head while he hates himself, a setting I recognized so fast it was less like watching a film than catching my reflection in a shop window I had not realized was there. And then it gets strange.

Kaufman gives Charlie a twin brother. Donald. Donald is everything Charlie is not, which is to say Donald is happy. Donald wanders into screenwriting the way other people wander into a good parking spot, attends a weekend seminar, learns the rules, and dashes off a serial-killer thriller so dumb and so commercial that it sells for a sum of money that makes Charlie want to lie down on the floor. Donald’s big twist is that the killer, the victim, and the detective are all the same person, and when Charlie gently points out that one person cannot be in two places at once, Donald is completely unbothered, because Donald has discovered the one freedom Charlie will never have, which is not caring.

Both brothers are played by Nicolas Cage, who in another film had surgically swapped faces with John Travolta, so playing his own twin was for him practically an easy weekend. Meryl Streep is in it. A marvelous actor named Chris Cooper plays the orchid man and won an Oscar for it, a sentence I include just so you know the film is better than I am making it sound.

Here is the quirky part. Donald Kaufman does not exist. There is no Donald. Charlie Kaufman is an only child who invented a brother, gave him a personality, gave him worse taste, and then put his name on the screenplay, so that the credited writers of the finished movie are “Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman.” And when the film was nominated for an Academy Award, the nomination went to both of them, which means a person who has never been born was nominated for an Oscar for co-writing a film about not existing.

I first saw the film around 2004, on a DVD taken from a video store called TicTac in RA Puram, Chennai. I thought it fell apart at the end. It does fall apart at the end. It took me an embarrassing number of years to understand that the falling-apart is the point, that I had watched a man burn down his own house on purpose and gone outside to complain about the smoke.

Because near the end a real person walks into the movie. Robert McKee, the most famous screenwriting teacher alive, who travels the world running a seminar on the holy architecture of structure, played by a wonderful growling actor whose name I had to look up and am not going to pretend otherwise. The drowning Charlie goes to the seminar for rescue, and McKee, on screen, roars that the one unforgivable sin, the mark of the hack, is voiceover narration. A writer who leans on voiceover, he thunders, has given up. The entire film is narrated, top to bottom, in voiceover.

Kaufman imported the high priest of structure specifically so the priest could denounce, by name, the device Kaufman was using to tell the story, while he used it. And then he does the braver thing. He takes the advice anyway. He asks McKee how to end the picture, McKee says send them out dizzy and they will forgive you everything, and the movie obediently hands itself an ending stolen straight from Donald’s garbage thriller. Drugs, a gun, a midnight chase through a swamp, an actual alligator, a death, a small moral about love beamed nearly into the lens. Every cliché Charlie spent two hours being too refined for arrives at once, like relatives, and Donald, who would have loved every second, dies in the swamp.

And it works. That is what I could not forgive at twenty-six and have come to love since. The dumb ending lands. After two hours of gorgeous paralysis the gun and the gator hit you exactly where Donald swore they would, and you leave the theater moved, and faintly humiliated by how moved you are.

The tidy reading is that the formula is the enemy, that Charlie was the artist and Donald the sellout and art beats commerce. The film will not say this. It refuses with something that looks like real grief. Donald is not the villain. Donald is the part of every person who makes anything that knows where the buttons are and feels no shame about pressing them, and the film loves him without respecting him and never resolves the contradiction, because resolving it would be a lie, and this film would rather end on an alligator than tell you a lie. The credits carry a dedication. In loving memory of Donald Kaufman. They are grieving the half of one man that knew how to finish things.

What Kaufman worked out, drowning in those orchids, is the thing I keep failing to remember about a man on hold. He could not find the story in the book because the story was never in the book. The story was him, failing to find it. The thing he was hunting for was the hunt. The orchids had no plot and were never going to grow one, and the second he stopped pretending the writer was a clean sheet of glass between the reader and the flowers, the wall turned out to have been a door the entire time.

I went back and looked at my notes on the hold music, which I had been treating as evidence, as though if I gathered enough of it the essay would assemble itself out of the pile. The phrase that means its opposite. The recorded woman on her higher plane. The menu folding back into itself like a Möbius strip designed by someone who hated you. Brandon. And I saw, finally, that there was nothing inside any of it. The hold system is genuinely empty. That is the entire design. It is built to contain no story, no person, no exit, so that you will eventually do the math and hang up, and the company keeps its money and its afternoon. I had spent a winter trying to extract a human being from a structure engineered, at considerable expense, to make sure no human being was ever there.

The man I kept imagining, the lonely one who chose the music, was the tell. I had invented him for the same reason Kaufman invented a brother. Because the alternative was unbearable, and a fiction was carrying the weight of it, and the only way to write honestly about a thing with no one inside it was to put the person back in from the outside, and the person available was me. The fifty-one minutes were never the subject. The man who lost them was. I had been on hold, in every sense the phrase can carry, and the door I kept failing to find had my own hand on the other side of it the whole time, which is a sentence I would cut from anyone else’s draft for being too pleased with itself, and am keeping in mine.

I should confess, since it has been crouching under this whole thing, that I do not fully buy my own flattering version of events. The duller possibility is that hold music had a perfectly good essay in it and I simply was not good enough to find the latch, and that draping my small ordinary failure over Charlie Kaufman’s enormous glamorous one is a way of getting my inadequacy a better seat at the table. I see it. I definitely see it, guilty as charged.

The folder is still open. The phrase is still sitting in it, meaning the opposite of what it says, the way it always has. The Girl from Ipanema is going by somewhere under a mountain, tall and tan, outliving us all. Outside the sky has gone the flat Seattle gray that isn’t really a color so much as a mood the whole city agrees to, and I have not gone for my walk. I am about to not go on it again.

Donald would have finished this two hours ago. Worse, and shorter, and you would have called it his best work.
June 1, 2026

Never Mind, I Changed It

In the mid-nineties I had a college course on macroeconomics that required me to read a small book of about two hundred and thirty pages, a task I dispatched with the enthusiasm that’s reserved only for useful things like cleaning behind a fridge. What I did instead, with what now strikes me as faintly ridiculous devotion, was take the bus to the British Council Library on Mount Road in Chennai and read. There were no fans. It was quiet, and there was air conditioning, which in the Chennai of those years was unusual enough to feel slightly miraculous. The reason was not the macroeconomics. The reason was that I had been watching, on television in those years, a particular kind of Delhi economist, men in slightly rumpled kurtas and Kolhapuri sandals, sitting on panels, holding forth on subjects I did not understand in a way that made me feel I should. I had developed the conviction, with no evidence whatsoever, that if I went to the right library and read the right books I would, by some mild contagion, become that kind of person.

What I actually went there to read was a mixture of Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, and the British and American newspapers, where, in those years, a certain extremely public American affair was unfolding day by day in a way that made the broadsheets considerably more interesting than they otherwise might have been. I was, in short, going to the British Council to read tabloids and feel intellectual about it. But the Council was, as these places are, quietly disciplined about its shelves, and at some point in those afternoons I bumped into JM Keynes, more or less by accident. I was not looking for him. He was simply there, in the section one passed through to get to the periodicals, and after a while one stopped passing through and started sitting down. I bring this up because Keynes, more than almost anyone I have read since, gave me permission to change my mind, and I have been generously, perhaps excessively, exercising that permission ever since.

There is a famous line attributed to him, which goes: “when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” It is one of the great lines of twentieth-century thought, often quoted by people who would like to seem reasonable, and I am sorry to report that there is no especially good evidence he ever said it. Historians have looked. The earliest reliable appearances are years after his death. He may have said something close to it. He may have said it to someone who paraphrased it later. He probably did say something in that spirit, because his career is one long, public demonstration of saying it. But the specific sentence we love so much is, in all likelihood, a sentence we wrote for him. I find this perfect. A line about changing one’s mind, which we have collectively misremembered, and yet which is so deeply true about Keynes that we have decided, on the merits, to keep using it. The man revised his economics, his politics, his views on currency, his views on Germany, his views on the future of capitalism, sometimes within the span of a single decade, and we have built a folk quote for him about doing exactly that. The quote is wrong and the spirit is right, which is itself, I would like to suggest, a small case study in how minds work.

I change my mind constantly. In the way of a person who watches a movie trailer for eight seconds and announces that the film will be unwatchable, and then, two weeks later, watches the actual film and is in tears by the second act and does not, in any meaningful sense, remember that I had originally written it off. Last month, by my count, I changed my mind about a much-praised second novel whose author I am going to decline to identify (more on this in a moment, because it’s slightly painful), a restaurant (I had decided in advance the menu was trying too hard; the food was wonderful), a haircut I was on the verge of getting (saved by a single honest friend), and a man I met at a thing, about whom I will not say more, except that my opening assessment was extremely confident and almost entirely incorrect.

The author I mentioned above is worth a sentence. My wife, who is a more patient and disciplined reader than I am, said the second novel of the author was disorienting in a way she found genuinely sad. She had wanted to like it. She had set aside the time. She had read it patiently in two languages, and at the end of all that patience reported, with what struck me even at the time as remarkable fairness, that she had simply not been able to enjoy it. I declared, with the unearned confidence of someone who had not yet opened the second one, that my wife was wrong, that I would love it, and that the matter was settled. I would like to be honest about how this turned out. The prose, in the parts I read, is still extraordinary. It has all of the author’s typical sensitivity, that quality of the author’s sentences have of attending to the small thing in the room you would not have thought to notice. The character at the centre of much of the early book is one of the more interesting people I have met in fiction in some time. I wanted to keep going. I tried, several times, to keep going. I gave up somewhere after chapter eight, defeated less by the writing than by a timeline that kept disorienting me in a way I no longer had the patience to fight.

I have kind of told my wife this, although “told” implies she did not already know. She knew. She has known since roughly the day I started arguing. Most of my mind-changes happen in the privacy of my own head, and this one has only partly made it out: I have admitted, in a low voice, on a good day, that she may have had a point, which is a very different thing from admitting she was right, and which she received with the patience of someone who had filed the matter under “resolved” long before I did. What I am not yet ready to do is the full version, the one where I walk into the kitchen and say that she was right and I was wrong and that I should not have argued with her about it for as long as I did. I am, in other words, doing exactly the thing this essay is about: I have updated, and I am refusing to ratify the update entirely, mostly to deny the other party the small satisfaction of being right out loud. A satisfaction she is, I suspect, enjoying anyway, quietly, without my cooperation. I should also say, for the record, that I intend to try the book again at some point, partly because the author deserves it, and partly because if I can talk myself back into the second book I will not, technically, owe an apology at all.

This is the rate at which my opinions about the world are quietly being updated, almost always without ceremony. This is what every adult is doing all day and most of us have simply stopped tracking the score.

You sit down to dinner with someone. By minute four you have made several decisions about her: what she does, what she’s like, whether you’ll want to see her again. By dessert most of those decisions have been quietly revised. You don’t notice. The revised version replaces the original cleanly, like one save file overwriting another, and if anyone asked you the next day what you thought of her, you would describe the dessert version as if it had been your view from the start. “Oh, I liked her immediately,” you’ll say. You did not. At minute four you were planning your exit. We do this all day. We do this with movies and books and people and ideas and recipes and weather forecasts.

The mind is a revision engine. It updates almost continuously and then, with what I can only describe as a small narrative kindness toward itself, edits the history so it looks like it always knew.

I used to tell a friend, with what I felt was a certain amount of philosophical poise, that I changed my mind whenever I got new information. This sounded, when I said it, like a principle. It sounded like the kind of thing Keynes would have said, if Keynes had said it. I felt, in those moments, like a serious person. The honest version, which I have grown into slowly, is that I update for many reasons that are not new information. I update when I am tired. I update when someone I respect raises an eyebrow. I update because a sentence sounded better the second time I read it, in a different mood, on a different day. The principle was real, in the sense that I do try to follow it. The principle was also a flattering label I had attached to a process that was running on its own with or without my permission. I think this is true of most of what we call our intellectual virtues. We have a personality, and we have a vocabulary that dignifies the personality, and the relationship between the two is closer than we like to admit.

Here is the part that took me embarrassingly long to notice. I do this all day, in private, with no anxiety whatsoever. Books, films, people, opinions about every subject from sourdough to monetary policy, constantly being revised, constantly being overwritten, the whole apparatus humming along in a state of cheerful low-grade inconsistency. But when someone else changes their mind in a way I can see (visibly and publicly, on something that matters), a small, slightly suspicious feeling appears in me, completely unbidden, that I would not endorse if I caught myself in it. “What changed?” I find myself wondering. “Was the original view wrong, or is this one wrong? Can he be trusted? Is this a real conviction or is he just being weak?”

I am, in those moments, holding another person to a standard of consistency that I do not, for one second, hold myself to. I revise my views about a film between the trailer and the credits, but I want my friends to have arrived at their politics in 1997 and held there, like a statue in a park. This is not, I think, a personal flaw. We all do this to each other. The world rewards consistency in other people and flexibility in ourselves, and almost no one is uncomfortable enough with this arrangement to mention it at parties.

I changed my mind about something recently. The specific something doesn’t matter for the purposes of this essay, and frankly I think the essay is better if I don’t say. What matters is that this was not one of my private revisions: neither the trailer nor the novel. This was a change of mind that other people could see. And the people around me noticed. They noticed it with a particular quality of attention I had not had directed at me in a while, which carried, underneath its politeness, a small and unmistakable request for an update on what happened. What had changed. Why now. Was I sure.

What was interesting, and slightly funny once I noticed it, was that I had been changing my mind about smaller things all that week, and no one had asked me to account for any of them. I had been wrong about a podcast on a morning and corrected it by the evening, and the world had not paused to inquire. I had been certain, on Monday, that I would dislike a book that I now consider a small treasure, and the universe had absorbed this update without a flicker. The size of the audience was the only thing that made this one different. The mechanism inside my head was the same.

It took me some time to understand why visible mind-changes carry a charge that private ones don’t, and the answer, when it arrived, was slightly humbling. Other people, more than we admit, more than they themselves like to admit, carry a small clay model of us around inside their heads. A version. A figurine. They built it from the evidence we carelessly left lying about, and having built it they use it: to plan, to predict, to relax in your presence, to know what to raise at a meeting and what to leave decently buried. The model is not a courtesy they extend to you. It is a piece of working equipment they use to get through their week.

When you change your mind in a way that is visible, you are not just updating your view. You are reaching into their heads and forcing them to re-sculpt the figurine. And re-sculpting people is real work. It is uncomfortable, and slightly exhausting, and we resent the work without quite knowing we resent it. We then, often, mistake the resentment for a moral judgment about the person who made us do it. He’s inconsistent. She doesn’t know her own mind. They’ve gone soft. They’ve gone hard. They’ve changed.

The accusation feels like it’s about them. It’s mostly about us. We are being asked to do a piece of mental labor we hadn’t budgeted for, and we don’t like it, and we look for someone to blame, and the person who just changed their mind is conveniently to hand. This is, I should say, not a complaint. I do this to other people too. The point is that knowing it doesn’t quite stop it. The reflex is older than the reasoning.

While we are being honest, I should mention the inverse, which is, if anything, less flattering to me. When someone changes their mind toward a position I already held, I do not, as I would like to claim, magnanimously welcome them into the fold. I experience, instead, a small, slightly indecent flicker of triumph. Finally. I was there first. Took you long enough. The flicker arrives before I have time to dress it up in better clothing, and it has nothing to do with the merits of the new position. It has to do with the fact that, for one small moment, I get to feel as if I have been quietly correct all along, and the arriving party is, by their arrival, conceding it.

This happens, I am embarrassed to report, on subjects of approximately no consequence. A friend who used to dismiss a particular sourdough restaurant in Woodinville finally goes, and finally agrees that the sourdough is, in fact, very good. A relative who spent a decade resisting a piece of music I had been playing in his presence the entire time wanders, late in life, into the fan club. These are people updating their views on bread and songs, which is a thing humans do roughly every fourteen minutes. And yet I notice, when it happens, a small private accounting taking place inside me, in which I add a point to my column, and they lose one from theirs, and the universe is briefly more correctly arranged than it was an hour ago.

I do not say this aloud. I have just enough sense not to. But I have, on more than one occasion, allowed myself a small mm of acknowledgment that meant, transparently, yes, I’ve known this for some time. Here is what sits less comfortably the longer I look at it. When other people do this to me, I find it intolerable. The mm. The look. The quiet yes, well. I find it patronizing. I find it slightly ungenerous. I find it beneath them, frankly.

I am, of course, doing exactly the same thing, in private, on every subject available to me. The mechanism is identical. Only the direction is reversed. What I want, I think, is for other people to update toward me silently, and to update toward them with a small but visible victory lap. This is not a defensible position. But it is, if I am being honest about it, the actual one.

Back to Keynes. He spent his career being publicly wrong about things and then publicly less wrong about them, often within a span short enough that his enemies could keep the receipts. He revised his position on the gold standard. He revised his position on Versailles, sort of. He revised his views on consumption, on saving, on the proper role of the state, on the long run versus the short run, all of it, in the open, in essays and letters and books that often disagreed with his own previous essays and letters and books. People held this against him at the time. Of course they did. He was making them redraw him constantly, and economists, like everyone else, would prefer not to keep an eraser handy. The accusation of inconsistency followed him around for decades.

But here is the thing about Keynes that I find I keep coming back to, in the years since I stopped taking the bus to libraries to read him. He was right more often than the people who weren’t changing their minds. Just, on the whole, more often, on the questions that mattered, in the long run that he famously remarked we were all dead in. The people who didn’t update were not, it turned out, more rigorous than him. They were just less embarrassed.

I think this is the part we don’t quite want to admit when we punish other people for changing their minds. The person who has held the same view for thirty years is not, by virtue of the holding, a more serious thinker than the person who has revised three times. They are sometimes more serious. They are sometimes just stuck. The difference between conviction and inertia is genuinely hard to tell from the outside, and we tend to award conviction generously, mostly because it asks less of us. We have built our social life, mostly without noticing, around the assumption that people don’t move much, and we punish movement accordingly, not because movement is wrong but because the alternative would mean redrawing each other everyday, and almost no one has that kind of time.

I am not going to stop changing my mind, partly because I don’t know how, and partly because I am no longer sure I should want to. I will keep being wrong about books from their first chapters, and sometimes also from their second ones, and occasionally from their authors’ previous, much-loved books. I will keep being wrong about people at minute four and revising by dessert. I will keep, occasionally, changing my mind about something larger, in a way that other people can see, and I will keep noticing the small disturbance this causes, and I will try, with what patience I can manage, not to mistake their discomfort for evidence that I have done something wrong.

The people who notice are not wrong to notice. They are doing, on me, the same work I do on myself constantly, in private, with no audience: updating a model in light of new behavior. They are mostly being asked to do it on a deadline, and without being warned, and that is an actual cost, and I would like to pay it gracefully when I can.

But I’m not going to apologize for the updating itself. The updating is what minds do. The updating is, possibly, the most interesting thing minds do. I used to think that consistency was a virtue. I have, predictably, changed my mind about that.
May 23, 2026

Shumatsu Papa

I went for a walk last Sunday afternoon and witnessed a man in a driveway trying to summon his Hyundai Ioniq out of his garage with an app. His wife and son were on the lawn, hugging each other and laughing at him with the specific giddy energy reserved for moments when a piece of expensive technology is making a husband look foolish in front of his family. The car was backing out about half as fast as a normal car would back out, and about a quarter as fast as it would have if the man had been inside it driving it like a normal person, which is to say it was backing out at the speed of a vehicle that had agreed in principle but was reserving the right to renegotiate. The man checked his phone, then the car, then his wife, then the phone. The wife kept laughing. The kid kept watching. I have no idea whether that boy will remember any of this when he is forty. I will tell you which version of his father he will remember, though. He will remember this one. The Sunday one. The one in the driveway, looking faintly ridiculous, being laughed at by his wife. The weekday version doesn’t make it to forty. Most things don’t.

I know this because I read the New York Times Sunday Routine column compulsively and have for years, and I only recently figured out why. Let me explain the column, if you don’t know it. Every Sunday, the Times profiles some notable person, an actress, a novelist, a chef, occasionally a hedge fund manager whose Sunday begins at four in the morning and is therefore not a Sunday but a Monday other people haven’t gotten to yet, and the column tells you exactly what they do with their day off. What time they get up. What they eat. Whether they go to the farmer’s market. They go to the farmer’s market. Whether they read three newspapers. They read three newspapers. Whether they cook on their day off if their job is cooking, which several of them do, and which I think is its own essay for another day.

I don’t really want to know about these people. I have never been to a farmer’s market with the kind of intentionality the Times column describes. I do not know what it would feel like to have a routine, in the sense the column means it, which is the sense of doing something on Sundays you actually want to do as opposed to doing something on Sundays because the laundry has reached a state of constitutional crisis. And yet I read it. I read it the way some people watch British baking shows, the way some people scroll Zillow listings of houses in towns they will never move to. There was something I was looking for and I could not name it, and then a few months ago at a Trader Joe’s I caught myself doing the same thing in the dairy aisle, and the thing had a shape. It was the hand-holding.

Couples in grocery stores on Sundays do this thing. One of them reaches for the milk. The other one is holding their hand. Not in a romantic way, in a I’m-here way, in the way you hold a hand you have been holding for fifteen years and have stopped thinking about. They are moving slowly. They are obstructing the aisle. The same two people on a Wednesday would have moved through that aisle like they were being timed by a fitness app. On Sunday the milk can wait. The aisle can wait. They have, briefly, no business being efficient. Once I noticed this I started seeing it everywhere. A father in Volunteer Park pushing his daughter on a swing as though the swing were a religious observance. The same man on Monday at the espresso bar in his office building would not be making eye contact with his own barista. A guy I saw on a bench in Paris once, in the Marais, reading a newspaper at noon with the particular Parisian conviction that what he was doing was not idleness but a small civic duty. A Tokyo father in Yoyogi Park with a stroller and a tiny dog, looking like he had never seen a meeting, like meetings had been invented for someone else, and I happen to know, because I had been in Tokyo earlier that week, that this man’s commuter-train face on Tuesday morning had been carved out of granite. The Yoyogi face was something else. Softer, maybe. Less defended. I had never seen it on the man and still felt like I knew it already.

Sundays don’t slow people down. That’s what I thought at first, and I was wrong, in the way you are wrong about something when you have the right data and the wrong theory. Cities are quieter on Sundays. Traffic does thin. None of that explains the swing. Here is what is actually happening. The man on the swing is not a slower version of the man at the espresso bar. He is a different man. He lives in the same body and gets out on a different schedule. The body is one body, but the man at the espresso bar and the man at the swing are not exactly the same person, and the kid in the swing is one of approximately four people on earth who has met both of them.

The Japanese have a clinical phrase for this. Shumatsu papa. My father told me about it, sometime in the late eighties, from behind The Hindu Newspaper on a Sunday afternoon. He had read a piece about Japanese salarymen, the hours they worked, the trains they slept on, the children who saw them only on Sundays, and he relayed it to me with the slightly amused detachment of a man describing an exotic foreign practice. They have a name for it, he said. Shumatsu papa. He thought the Japanese had it worse. He was, on the evidence, mostly right; Japanese hours were longer, the trains were sadder, the absence was more fundamental. He was also, on the evidence, one of millions of Indian fathers doing essentially the same job in a different climate, and he had located himself on the comfortable end of the comparison the way most of us locate ourselves on the comfortable end of any comparison that involves the word worse. There were also, to be fair to him, no obvious alternatives. He went back to his newspaper. He never mentioned it again. We had this in Madras. We just did not have a phrase for it. We had Sunday.

Our flat was five hundred square feet. Possibly four-eighty, depending on whether you counted the small verandah where the laundry lived a more interesting life than most of us. Four of us in there. Me, my sister, my mother, and a father who worked six full days a week at a job that exhausted him in ways that, at the time, I did not have the vocabulary to understand and now have too much of it. The Sunday nap was, in our house, a constitutional requirement. After lunch. Sunday lunch was longer than weekday lunch, by maybe twenty minutes, which doesn’t sound like a lot but in a five-hundred-square-foot flat with a single ceiling fan in 1989 was the difference between a meal and a small event. My father would roll out the pai on the floor of the front room and we would all lie down. All four of us. On a single woven mat. With the doors closed and the fan mostly just moving hot air around.

My father always woke up first. I don’t know why. I have a theory now, which is that he had figured out, somewhere in his thirties, that the nap was not actually rest. The nap was the door to Sunday afternoon. Sunday afternoon was the thing he had been working six days to reach. The longer he stayed asleep, the less of it he got. So he woke up at three, or sometimes two-forty-five, and he would shake me, very gently, without waking my mother or my sister, because what he had in mind required exactly one foot soldier and not three. The errand was tea powder. There was a shop a hundred feet from our front door. Less, maybe. I could throw a cricket ball and hit it, badly. This shop, like every shop in Purasawalkam in 1989, sold tea powder by the sachet, hung on a string from the ceiling like a small garland of laundry. You did not buy a tin. Buying a tin would have been an admission that you had planned to drink tea, and tea was not planned. Coffee was the lifeline. Tea was Sunday afternoon and my father had woken up wanting it. So you bought one sachet. One sachet was enough for the family. I would run, with two rupees in my hand, possibly less, and come back with the sachet warm from being clutched. My father would already have the milk on the stove. He had not lit it yet, because he was waiting for the sachet, but the milk was on it, the way a sprinter is on the blocks.

The chai he made was Bombay chai. He had spent three years in his twenties working for a firm in Bombay that, my mother once told me, had treated him not so well, although she did not specify how. From this period of his life, he retained two things: a low-grade suspicion of all landlords, which was unjust but which I have not had the heart to relitigate, and a recipe for chai that involved a quantity of cardamom that would have alarmed a normal household. He used a lot of cardamom. He used so much cardamom that I genuinely believed, until I was twenty, that all Bombay tea contained that much cardamom, and the first time I drank Bombay tea elsewhere I assumed it was broken. He added the sugar last. He never explained this. There was also a clove in there sometimes, allegedly, but I have no memory of the clove, because the cardamom had eaten it. The dominant edition eats the minor ones. Memory is unfair to small spices.

Then he would wake my mother and my sister with the chai, and he would go and read The Hindu. He read The Hindu the way men of his generation read newspapers, which is to say he opened it fully, with a wingspan of nearly five feet, and disappeared behind it for forty-five minutes. You could leave the room. You could come back. The newspaper would still be there, with two hands sticking out of the sides, and one foot, occasionally, doing a slow tap to a song he had just put on. The editorial section used to slide out onto the floor because he never folded the paper properly again after opening it the first time. My mother complained about this constantly. I think she was right. The paper occupied most of the room when fully expanded. Around four the music started. He had a Philips tape deck, and eventually a CD player that he never trusted, in the way certain people of his generation never quite trusted CDs to do what they had promised. On Sundays the same names came out, every Sunday for thirty years. S D Burman. Kishore. SPB. Asha. Some Lata although I am no longer entirely sure how much Lata; I may have added her in retrospect, because she belongs there. Some Tamil playback if he was in a particular mood. I made a playlist after he died. It is almost exactly the playlist of those Sunday afternoons in 1989. I have not added a song to it. I do not think I ever will.

lazylens.com

At four-thirty, give or take, he would announce that anyone who wanted to go to Sandhya Restaurant could come. My mother almost always declined, with the small pleasure of a woman who has been managing a government job and household for six days and was not going to spend her Sunday afternoon evaluating someone else’s chaat. My sister and I went every time. He would walk us, the quarter mile down Purasawalkam High Road, past the temple, past the bus stand, past a tailor’s shop with a mannequin in the window that had been wearing the same shirt since 1985, possibly 1987, the years have started to compress, and we would arrive at Sandhya Restaurant, which served North Indian food at a level of authenticity that absolutely nobody in Purasawalkam was qualified to evaluate but which we patronized with the loyalty of regulars who had decided not to know. The Sandhya tea was made in a brass vessel the size of a small bathtub. It boiled all afternoon, the way the chai at certain Indian establishments does, which is to say it had been boiling since approximately 1973 and was, by physics if not chemistry, a different substance than the tea anyone had made that morning. It was thicker than my father’s. Sweeter. Slightly oilier. My father would have a cup. Sometimes two. He would let me have one, which my mother had explicitly forbidden and which both of us understood would not be discussed when we got home. My sister usually had Chola Batura and Limca. The pav bhaji at Sandhya came on a steel plate with a small mound of chopped raw onion and a wedge of lime, and there was a slick of butter on top of the bhaji that you were supposed to stir in but never did. You scooped around it. You preserved it. You ate it last. I still do this, in my forties, in restaurants that have never heard of Purasawalkam.

He worked six days a week. Full days. I am going to say this once and then not put any sentences around it. He left before I got up. He came home after I had stopped expecting him. From Monday to Saturday, my father was a tired man who was kind, but the kindness was rationed in the way the kindness of tired adults is rationed, by people who do not have the surplus to spend. The man who made cardamom chai on Sunday afternoon was not a tired man. He hummed. He did not hum on Mondays. I knew this without having been told. Kids know.

I should admit, before going any further, that I might be making all of this up. Not the cardamom. The cardamom I will defend in any court. Not Sandhya, not the playlist, not the garland of tea sachets, not the mannequin in the shirt since 1985 or 87. Those are facts. What I am less sure about is the man. It is entirely possible that the difference I keep wanting to describe between weekday-father and Sunday-father is a difference I have constructed in retrospect, out of the fact that I only really had access to him on Sundays, and the rest of the week he was a function and not a person, and I have spent thirty years assembling a man out of those Sunday afternoons because the alternative was admitting how little I knew the weekday version. Anyway.

I don’t actually think kids experience adults as continuous people. Adults insist they are, mostly because paperwork would become impossible otherwise. What a kid gets is the recurring edition. The Sunday father. The festival father. The man who arrives at school events looking slightly uncomfortable in trousers he does not wear at home. The funeral edition, which is the one you don’t meet until you are older and which arrives, when it arrives, as an entirely new species. Kids assemble a parent out of these editions the way a paleontologist assembles a dinosaur out of bones. You get the foot. You get a vertebra. You make a guess about the rest. You don’t know, until decades later, how much of your father you were inventing. The children of shumatsu papas everywhere have always known both versions, in every country that has ever had a six-day work week and a household to come home to, which is most of them.

This, I think, is what the Sunday Routine column is doing, and why I read it. Most profile journalism captures people in their public capacity. The novelist at her desk. The CEO at her conference table. The actress in her green room. The journalist sits with the subject for two hours during work hours and reports back on the version the world is paying to see. The Sunday Routine column is the only column in the newspaper that goes to the kitchen. It goes at seven-thirty in the morning. It catches them in sweatpants, walking the dog, making pancakes for a kid who is not actually hungry. It is, exactly, what a child does. The column is doing, with strangers, what I started doing at eleven in a five-hundred-square-foot flat on Purasawalkam High Road, which is trying to figure out who someone is when they are not being asked to be useful. The rest of the newspaper has given up on telling us. The column has not. I read it on Sundays. I have noticed this only now.

Civilization built the window through which any of this is possible, and it built it everywhere. The Christian Sunday. The Jewish Sabbath. The Friday in Cairo when the father is walking his daughter home from prayer along a street where the shops have closed for the same reason they close in Purasawalkam. The market day, the festival pause. The day moves. The window doesn’t. A Cairo father on a Friday afternoon and a Madras father on a Sunday afternoon are the same man in different weather, and a Cairo kid watching her father walk back from prayer is doing the same assembly job a Madras kid was doing on Purasawalkam High Road in 1989. Nobody designed this. It accumulated. It is one of the oldest pieces of soft infrastructure humans ever built, and we have mostly forgotten it was ever specifically anything, and you can move to a country that has never looked anything like yours and find Sunday already installed, holding the window open, doing its quiet weekly work, asking nothing of you except that you show up.

I went back to Sandhya in 2019. Purasawalkam has changed. The tailor’s shop is gone. The bus stand has moved. The temple is the same temple. The brass vessel is the same vessel, or its grandchild, you cannot tell. The pav bhaji still arrives with the slick of butter on top. It was humid enough that my glasses fogged when I walked in. I stirred the butter in this time. I am older. I cannot defend the choice.

Somewhere in the world, right now, a shumatsu papa is waking his kid from a Sunday nap. He has six other days of being someone else. There is cardamom on the counter. There is milk on the stove. In ninety minutes he will be humming a song he does not hum on Mondays, and the kid will be assembling a parent out of the afternoon without knowing it. The fathers, of course, only know one. They are inside it.

May 23, 2026

selvi akka’s tomato plant

there is a tomato plant
behind selvi akka’s building
growing out of an old blue paint bucket
split down one side
like somebody meant to throw it away
and forgot halfway through

selvi akka says she never planted it

selvi akka also says
ilaiyaraaja once ate bajji
from her cousin’s tea stall in kodambakkam
so you can believe what you want

every year
right after the first hard summer rain
that little plant climbs the back wall again

weak-looking at first
leaves hanging tired
like they got no business trying
then one hot week later
it is everywhere
twisting through the grill gate
like the whole place belongs to it

last year
a boy with a camera
stood near the drainage canal almost half an hour
taking pictures of it

selvi akka watched from upstairs
without saying a word

that was unusual

the corporation workers complain about it
kids knock the green tomatoes down with chappals
one man from the first floor
tried plucking a few once
and selvi akka came downstairs in her nightie
shouting so loud
every window opened at the same time

funny thing is
nobody there even cooks with tomatoes that much anymore

still
every summer
that plant comes back
acting like it knows something

like
it knows something
the rest of us don’t.

May 16, 2026

1.618 (Approximately)

Audrey Hepburn

Here is a secret about photographs. The most important tool in a photographer’s kit is not the camera. It is the crop. I have taken a great many photographs in my life, and I am fairly certain I have made more crops than clicks. The photograph arrives first. The decision comes later. You drag the little handles. You nudge the frame left, then up, then back. You are not thinking about mathematics. You are not thinking about ancient Greece. You are thinking, if you are thinking at all, something like “no, no, there”. And you stop. Nobody teaches you how to do this. There is no class called Introduction to Cropping for the Mildly Uncertain. You figured it out the way you figured out which side of the pillow is the cool side: through a private, inarticulate conviction you would struggle to defend under oath. You can spend forty-five minutes in a toothpaste aisle, paralyzed by the difference between “whitening” and “advanced whitening,” which, as far as anyone can tell, is the word advanced. But a photograph you fix in four seconds with a breezy confidence.

Golden ratio (or whatever)

There is a name for what you just did. Or rather, there is a name for the neighborhood of instinct you wandered into. It carries the faint, reassuring whiff of ancient Greek authority, which is the best kind of authority, because the people who held it are all dead and cannot appear on a podcast to correct you. It is called the golden ratio. The golden ratio is approximately 1.618. It is represented by the Greek letter phi (φ), because mathematicians enjoy naming things after symbols most people cannot type without assistance. The number comes from a relationship so simple it feels like it shouldn’t matter: the ratio of the larger part to the smaller is the same as the ratio of the whole to the larger part. If that sentence made you feel like you were being lowered into deep water, don’t worry. The number has never once required your understanding. It has been showing up uninvited for twenty-five centuries and is not about to stop now.

And it shows up everywhere. The Parthenon, we are told, was built to golden-ratio proportions. Leonardo da Vinci, a man who could not finish a painting if you held a crossbow to his head but who could start one like nobody in the history of civilization, allegedly embedded it in the Mona Lisa, in the Vitruvian Man, in what appear to be the margin doodles of a catastrophically overcommitted genius. The nautilus shell supposedly spirals in a golden curve. Sunflower seeds arrange themselves in Fibonacci sequences that converge toward phi. The proportions of Audrey Hepburn’s face, we are told, conform to the ratio, which, if true, means that mathematics itself looked at Audrey Hepburn and said, “yes, that one”. Your face, if it happens to be attractive, is said to obey the ratio. Your face, if it does not, is said to be “interestingly asymmetrical,” which is what people say when the math has gently let you down. Over the centuries, the golden ratio has accumulated a reputation that most numbers would find mortifying. It has been called the divine proportion, the secret of beauty, the mathematical signature of God. That is a lot of pressure for a number that is, at the end of the day, just sitting there being irrational. There are books about it. There are TED talks about it. There are graphic designers who will charge you eleven thousand dollars to apply it to your company logo, though what they are mostly applying is a rectangle.

The whole thing feels wonderful, for a while. Here is one number, precise and eternal, that explains why certain things look right. Why the curve of a seashell pleases you. Why that photograph, once cropped, felt suddenly correct. It suggests that beauty is not a matter of taste, not some argument you are going to lose to a friend who went to art school. It suggests that beauty is structural. The universe has preferences, and miracle of miracles, they resemble yours.

The trouble begins when someone actually checks. Take the Parthenon. It is undeniably beautiful, and it does contain rectangles, and some of those rectangles are in proportions close to the golden ratio, if you are flexible about where you start measuring and where you stop. Do you include the steps? The pediment? The parts that have not survived the last two thousand years or so? Depending on what you choose, you can find the ratio, or something near it, or something not particularly near it that you can describe as “approximately golden” if you squint and deploy the word approximately. The nautilus shell has a similar problem. Its spiral is gorgeous and logarithmic, but its actual ratio is closer to 1.33 than 1.618. Calling this the golden ratio is like calling someone six feet tall when they are five foot four. You can do it. But only if you have a very relaxed relationship with accuracy. As for da Vinci, look, he almost certainly knew about the ratio. He illustrated a whole book on it (his friend Pacioli’s book). Whether he deliberately planted it in his paintings is another matter. You can lay a golden rectangle over the Mona Lisa and it will frame her face nicely. You can also lay it over a photograph of a Taco Bell and it will frame the drive-through menu nicely. The rectangle is not a detective. It does not find beauty. It is just a shape. The finding is being done by the person holding it, who arrived with a theory and, surprise, left with confirmation. Spend any time on the internet and you will recognize the dynamic.

In 1876, a German psychologist named Gustav Fechner did something radical. He asked people a question. He showed them rectangles, tall ones, wide ones, squares, all the rectangles he could lay hands on, and asked which they found most pleasing. That was the whole study. No theory, no golden anything, no prompting. Just: which rectangle do you like? The results showed a strong preference for rectangles near the golden ratio. This was taken as proof. The ratio wasn’t just in temples and seashells. It was in us. Hard-wired. An aesthetic instinct so deep it came before language, before culture, before anyone had ever had an opinion about fonts. Except. Later studies found that the preference was fuzzier than Fechner claimed. People didn’t converge on 1.618 like homing pigeons. They converged on a range. They liked rectangles longer than a square but not absurdly so. They hated extremes. They wanted something balanced but not symmetric, alive but not chaotic, interesting but not trying too hard. They wanted, basically, the visual equivalent of the person at a dinner party that everyone is secretly hoping to be seated next to. The golden ratio lives in that zone. But it doesn’t own it. What Fechner had discovered was not that humans love a specific number. He had discovered that humans love a specific kind of balance. A balance that avoids perfection. A balance with room to breathe. The kind you recognize when you see it, in a photograph or in a face.

There is a term for this in design. It is called dynamic symmetry and it actually describes something rather profound. Static symmetry is a mirror. Left matches right. Nothing surprises you. It is bland like a passport photo or a tax form. It is satisfying the way folding laundry is satisfying, orderly and complete and nobody’s idea of a good time. Dynamic symmetry is balance through inequality. A large shape on one side answered by a small one on the other. The composition holds because the mismatches resolve.

Wes Anderson Frame

Think of a Wes Anderson frame, symmetrical, composed, almost oppressively precise. Now think of a Spielberg frame, off-centre, weighted to one side, somehow more alive for it. Both work. But only one makes you lean forward. The golden ratio is one flavor of dynamic symmetry. It is not the rule. It is a description, after the fact, of something we were already inclined to do. A mathematical Post-it stuck to an instinct that got there first.

Schindler’s List (Spielberg Frame)

I am writing this on a Saturday afternoon in May. The coffee is cold. I keep getting up to look at the bird feeder at the neighbor’s house, which a squirrel has been working on for an hour and a half now with the dogged optimism of a creature that has confused effort with progress. I mention this because I am about to make a turn in the essay, and the turn is going to feel a little abstract, and I want it on the record that I have been thinking about a squirrel.

Here is the turn. If the golden ratio were a law of beauty, a real law, the way gravity is, then beauty would be something we discover. We would find it the way we find a planet. It would be there whether we showed up or not. That is not what happens. What happens is: we see a shell, and something in us responds. We build a temple, and it stirs something we didn’t expect. We crop a photograph, and the frame clicks into place with a rightness that is almost physical. Then, only then, we go looking for the reason. We measure. We overlay spirals on the image. And when the numbers land somewhere near 1.618, we say there it is, proof that beauty is mathematical. But the feeling came first. The measurement came after. We did not discover beauty in the ratio. We discovered the ratio in things we already found beautiful. And there is a difference between those two sentences that is, depending on your patience for that kind of phrasing, either enormous or annoying. We are pattern-completing animals. We see two dots and a curved line and we see a face. We hear three notes and we finish the melody. We read half a sentence and we are already building the other half before our eyes arrive. This is what your brain does all day, at breakfast, in traffic, during meetings you are pretending to pay attention to. We take the incomplete and we make it whole, so fast and so constantly that we have mistaken this for the world being orderly when in fact it is us, frantically ordering it. Beauty, whatever beauty actually is, seems to live in the gap between the pattern and its completion. Not in the pattern. In the moment of recognition. When the crop lands or when the chord resolves. The golden ratio captures one frequency of that recognition. A proportion where the tension is just noticeable and just resolved. But the ratio is not doing the work. You are.

Something else. The ratio is not the only system that sells itself this way. We are surrounded by frameworks that arrived after the fact and now insist they came first. The bestseller list does not tell you which book is good. It tells you which book a great many people bought, which is a different question, though the list is happy to let you confuse them. The Rotten Tomatoes score does not tell you whether you will love a film. It tells you the average reaction of strangers, processed through an aggregation rule someone in an office decided was reasonable. The algorithm that decides what plays next does not know what moves you. It knows what people who resemble you have clicked on, which is not the same thing, and has never been the same thing, no matter how many times the autoplay starts before you are ready. These systems do what the golden ratio does. They take a wide, messy range of human preferences and hand it back to you as a number. They convert “you found this beautiful” into “this is, by measurement, beautiful”. And then they quietly suggest you might want to update your taste accordingly.

The trick is the same trick. The feeling came first. The measurement came after. But by the time the measurement arrives, dressed up in authority and decimal places, it begins to look like the source rather than the description. You start checking the score before you trust your own response. You wait to see what the room thinks before you decide what you think. You measure your enjoyment of a film against its Metacritic average and feel vaguely embarrassed if the numbers don’t agree. And over time, the measurement stops reflecting the preference and starts shaping it. This is the real lesson the golden ratio almost teaches us. It is that we are forever inventing systems to tell us what to feel, and then forgetting that we invented them. The ratio is harmless. Most of these systems are harmless too. But the instinct underneath, to outsource recognition to something that looks more authoritative than your own response, is worth noticing. You already know how a photograph should be cropped. You already know which sentence in a paragraph is the one that landed. You already know which song you want to hear again. The number can come later, if it comes at all. It is allowed to describe the preference. It is not allowed to replace it.

I have been doing the same thing writing this essay. A paragraph got too long and something said break. The argument drifted into abstraction and I pulled it back to a photograph, a shell, a rectangle, because the concrete thing felt right and the abstract thing was starting to feel like a lecture, and nobody wants that. I have been cropping this essay the entire time. And so have you. You skimmed where it dragged. You slowed where it surprised you. You have been composing your reading the way I have been composing my writing, and neither of us used a formula.

The golden ratio is exactly 1.6180339887498948482. It will continue forever. It will never repeat. It will never resolve. Neither will the instinct it is trying to describe.

Your Call Is Important to Us

Never Mind, I Changed It

Shumatsu Papa

selvi akka’s tomato plant

1.618 (Approximately)